April 2013

There’s nothing remarkable about a Louisville woman pretending to be ordained to the priesthood.

Sadly, dioceses like Louisville, Cincinnati, and Rochester that were led by the decadent Bernardin-Jadot bishops are still plagued by this sort of nuttiness, and it will probably take the reform of the grave to heal them fully.

What’s remarkable is how devoid of love, service, and humility, the marks of any true vocation, the Louisville woman’s story is.

Barack Obama, whose policies on abortion hark back to the ghastly practices of decadent first century Rome, accuses pro-lifers of wanting to turn back to the 1950s. That would make us progressive, would it not?

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama vowed Friday to join Planned Parenthood in fighting against what he said are efforts by states to turn women’s health back to the 1950s, before the Supreme Court legalized abortion nationwide, and singled out the GOP-governed states of North Dakota and Mississippi for criticism.

You can’t make this stuff up. Cincinnati city councilman Chris Seelbach is protesting NFL Hall-of-Fame member Anthony Munoz delivering the commencement address at Xavier University, a Catholic university. Evidently, Munoz opposes the redefinition of marriage, a Catholic position. Here’s a snip:

In a Facebook post this past weekend, Seelbach referred to to Munoz’s ties to the conservative organization Citizens for Community Values, which opposes gay marriage. Seelbach, who is gay, said Cincinnati has a lot to be proud of regarding lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered rights. He cites three initiatives, including the city extending health benefits to all city employees regardless of sexual orientation.

In his posted weekly homily from last Sunday, Fr. Martin Fox, parochial vicar for Cincinnati’s St. Rose church and director of the archdiocesan priestly formation office, addresses the concepts of salvation and evangelization, and concludes with some provocative questions:

Fast-forward to last week, in Boston.
Those two young men who are suspected of setting off that bomb–
who seem to have lost their way and listened to evil counsel;
I wonder if anyone told them about Jesus Christ?
What if they listened?

The amazing thing is, no one had to go around the world,
to the Caucasus Mountains, to share the hope of Christ.
Those men came here, where the vast majority are Christians;
To a city with hundreds of thousands of Catholics.
The older one, who died, looked around and said,
no one has any values anymore.

Does it matter if we share our faith?
Does it matter if our lives are convincing witnesses?
What do you think?

Jean Lim, a visiting professor at Xavier University’s Theology Department last in the news for claiming on the eve of the 2012 presidential election that the policies of Republican vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan “threaten” Church teaching, and for similarly blasting Republican House Speaker John Boehner in 2011 when he was invited by Catholic University to deliver a commencement address, pens a report for the Catholic Telegraph of Cincinnati on last weekend’s 50th anniversary gala for Pacem in Terris at XU. Among the featured themes was “the consistent ethic of life,” a non-magisterial concept developed by Cardinal Bernardin about twenty years after the promulgation of Pope John XXIII’s encyclical. 300 students from local Catholic high schools were in attendance.